JUDD: Oh, of course not, Larry. First, how do you do? Thank you so much for having us on the show. What is really important is to maintain a healthy and natural ecological balance between predators and prey. And allowing wealthy humans, primarily urban hunters or those who are bounty hunters from out of state, to go to Alaska and for sport hire airplanes, hire private pilots to fly around and kill wolves in this incredibly savage manner, it’s not right. It is not ethical. It is not appropriate. It doesn’t make sense on any level.
KING: What about people that say to you, Ashley, you don’t live in Alaska? So there is 400 wolves, so what?

JUDD: Well, I think that in terms of — my response to that, Ghandi said it best: we know everything we need to know about a society by seeing how it treats its animals. And this is a conservation issue more than it is particularly an animal rights issue. And it matters to me because, as I said at the top, it is wrong on so many levels. I think what I find particularly galling in the governor’s statement is that somehow this is interfering with poor rural Alaskan’s ability to subsistence hunt. That is a distortion. In fact, there is a native tribe in the area who applied to be able to expand their subsistence hunting and she said no. This is for urban hunters. It’s for trophy hunters from out of state. And in terms of managing the population of caribou, hello, wolves do that best. That’s why the natives honor them as the animal that keeps genetic populations healthy.

JUDD: What I make, Larry, is that we are in a transition period in our country, where we are figuring out that we can actually care about multiple things at once. And the archaic debate between the environment and the economy is just that, archaic and over. It’s done. It’s rigid, black and white, all or nothing thinking. We know now, by virtue of great thinkers like Van Jones, who wrote the “Green Collar Economy,” that we can solve our two biggest problems at once, the environment and the energy crisis.

We can fight poverty and pollution at the same time. These things go hand in glove. Caring about human rights, caring about conservation, of course they fit together naturally. Look at Rwanda, stress on the environment, competition for resources due to overpopulation, genocide. It all works together. So it doesn’t — it’s not an either/or conversation anymore.